Brief Roguelike history.

Do you mean that it didn't load, or that you didn't understand?

A M.U.D. by definition is text based "graphics" in the style of original Rogue (and ANSII Pixel Dungeon).

Discworld still maintains an active M.U.D. that uses a browser based portal.

https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/decafmud/web_client.html

A tile based M.U.D. would be called a M.O.R.P.G. such as Diablo. As the internet advanced, M.M.O.R.P.G. became standard such as World of Warcraft or Ragnarock Online.

While title based RPGs add eye-candy, MUDs can be run on anything from Android to Atari with minimal resource requirements.

MUDs were after all originally created for UNIX and dialup B.B.S.s. I was a big fan of Zugg's MUD.

Most of the source codes are released on Github. Through Github one can look at the Commits and compare code between version's. I don't know that anyone has ever done a percentage comparison report. That would be interesting, though very time consuming.

Also, comparing the APK's won't do. The Smali code (compiled JAVA) is bundled into DEX files, and that code is archived into zip files. To compare code differences that way, one must unpack and decompile every APK and perform a CRC/MD5/etc type comparison of every file, requiring about 15Gb of storage. A simple change in the use of AAP vs AAP2 compression can result in code changes wherein 100% of the code might look different when it is the exact same code. This tripple (or more) packing process for APK's makes CRC/MD5/etc. comparison nearly impossible to get accurate results.

I know as I did a similar method to create my PD database.

https://lemmy.world/post/10401791

Too, several hundred Github repositories are nothing more than clones of the original with names changed and nothing else.

Years ago there was a DOS tool to do comparison of BIN files for the Atari 2600 roms. It decompiled and examined code changes between thousands of roms and produced a family tree output. However, those files are 4K and not compressed. I will look around and see if a modern tool might be able to do the same for Android files, however, I think the Github data is goint to be the easier route.

Dragon magazine reported on several occassions wherein the two met and banged heads. Although fans rarely saw them argue, it happened.

Dragon articles -

For example, he says:

I found the "Ring Trilogy" . . . well, tedious. The action dragged, and it smacked of an allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor's dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tomes that I took nearly three weeks to finish them.

And then later on:

Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games. The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke . . . poof! Nothing usable there.

In addition, several civil action suits were filed between the two, the most notable when Tolkein sued TSR over copyright infringement.

"During the first few years after the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1973, Gary Gygax, who had the strongest impact on the fantasy elements of the game, denied any direct influences from fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien. Many players recognized immediately that numerous D&D character and creature names came directly from the books. But it took until 1977 for intellectual property lawyers from a firm which had licensed the rights to Tolkien’s work to send a cease-and-desist order, at which point TSR Inc. (then known as Tactical Studies Rules) Gygax’s publishing house, famously changed the names of characters with ties to those works. Thus, in basic D&D “hobbit” became “halfling,” and “ent” became “treant.”"

Beyond the press, media, and courts, we, the members of Evermoore Knight's (a group of people who gamed and playtested with Gygax), and I, who did work for TSR, Paladium, G.U.R.P.S. and other gaming systems, knew at a personal level the arguements that took place. Although to the fans the two systems, LotR and D&D, bare a strong resemblance, what inspired them and the creator's behind them were polar opposites.

(Of course, all that paled in comparison to how much Gygax's wife would come to want him dead, his lifes work destroyed, and D&D burried forever. She nearly succeeded too, creating Wizard's of the Coast and turning D&D and many other board games into indiscernible D20 garbage, wherein if not for a title one can't tell the difference from D&D, Shadowrun, etc. But that is a whole other matter and unrelated to Pixel Dungeon.)

I did some hunting around and found something I think you will enjoy.

THIS is a link to an archive of 3 Android APK's including Nethack, UnNethack that expanded on Nethack, and Slash'Em that vastly expanded on both.

There is a minor annoyance however, Google. They love breaking things that work, and when they switched to Android 11 Google broke thousands of game's. In this case, Android prevents these APK's from creating the data folder (unless one is running an older version of Android).

The fix is simple but implimenting it can be annoying. The easiest method is to attach your device to a PC and make the folders (screw Android's security). For those who don't have a PC, you will have to use a File explorer with permission to make folders in the Android\Data folder.

If you get an error that the game can't process the content, it is because Android prevented the installation from making the folder. The 3 folder you "may" have to manually create to run the games are -

com.tbd.NetHack

con.tbd.UnNetHack

com.tbd.slex

That aside, the 3 games will work on Android 13.

I've been informed that Nethack 3.7.0 was released in 2023 for Windows and a few other systems (not Android). The Android newest release is 3.6.6-2

It includes several popular Tile sets to chose from and the option to load Custom sets.

The tile sets prior to 3.6.0 no longer work in the new versions, however, I was able to locate several more and put them into this archive.

https://filetransfer.io/data-package/xQZmrqad#link

Watabou stopped developement at v1.9.2a. Others have made their own expansions/modifications since he made the code open source. Out of that about a hundred PD's came out, and from those, Shattered and Remixed have (arguably) become the two most developed and used worldwide.

PD, SPD, most (though not all) PD's have seperate developers.